As a venture capital firm focused on 3D Urban Mobility, we’re privileged to have a panoptic view of the innovation happening in this sector, as it relates to the Space- and DroneTech ecosystems.
Our focus at Psion is on the emerging digital infrastructure that will be expanded over the next several years and will form the building blocks for this new mobility future.
The next era of mobility will be characterised by a series of transformations: an increase in device and vehicle connectivity, leading to a transition from manual operation towards autonomous control; an increase in the purchase of individual trips rather than vehicles, leading to less ownership and more sharing; a move from combustion towards electrification, most notably in urban areas. These changes will rapidly lead to the fundamental transformation of urban mobility infrastructures.
This fundamental transformation that is currently underway lead us to think differently about the way these technologies will interplay with each other – away from the siloed approach currently endemic in the industry.
We feel that it is important that the true extent of this innovation is captured in a manner that makes it easily digestible for players in both the industry sectors touched on and Venture Capital communities. It is for this reason that we’ve decided to publish our own Psion 3D Urban Mobility Tech Market Map.
Although others have previously attempted their own versions of what we call “2D” Mobility, we feel strongly that such efforts have significantly understated the richness of the evolving 3D Urban Mobility ecosystem by typically focusing on just the ground-based or air-based services and seeing no interconnectivity between the two. We see the two closely connected. Hyundai and others have recognised this. This video by Hyundai gives us a glimpse of a possible future, albeit incomplete in our opinion.
For example, “Flying cars” or eVTOLs (electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing vehicles) will be flying as soon as 2024 in Europe, and probably even sooner in Asia. These, we predict, will be integrated into new 3D Mobility ecosystems along with delivery drones, autonomous ground vehicles etc.
Therefore, we think that looking at this innovation in the broader, soon to be interconnected ecosystem worldwide, needs to be represented and hence bringing to the forefront many of the areas which we at Psion believe hold the promise of transformational growth.
By aiming to capture the emerging companies at the forefront of the seismic changes affecting the broader mobility industry, our market map aspires to shed some much-needed light on the astonishing levels of innovation occurring ‘under the surface,’ enabling technologies right across the 3D Urban Mobility value chain.
We hope that our market map helps paint a clearer picture of what is in our view a still nascent, but nonetheless thriving ecosystem in which incumbent players are starting to take notice. Although 3D Urban Mobility may not yet have reached a true inflexion point, we believe the richness of this burgeoning ecosystem is indicative of what we see as a rapid transition to a world where utilisation of mobility assets will massively increase, leading to 10 fold drops in the cost of transportation, all playing out before the end of this decade.
Over the forthcoming years, we expect momentum to accelerate rapidly and that as and when this tsunami does truly break, it will unleash a wave of disruption the effect of which will be keenly felt far beyond just the trillion-dollar 3D Urban Mobility sector.
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A word on our taxonomy and how we have looked to categorise each company.
We have limited our market map solely to start-ups / emerging companies rather than including some of the large incumbents that undoubtedly also operate in this market. We acknowledge the limitation of this. The same is true for the difficult decision to include each individual company in just a single category, despite the fact that many are active in multiple different market segments. We have sought to try and categorise each business on the basis of whatever we perceive as being the core element of their proposition.
We have not sought to include every company we’ve identified in our map – it is just a relatively small sample of the businesses we’ve engaged with to date. We will be looking to update the market map periodically, so we would love to hear from any companies that we may have overlooked or any that feel we have positioned them incorrectly on the map.
